The tagines of North Africa hold considerable allure, not just in Morocco, where the Berber tribes originated both the distinctive ceramic vessel and the fragrant stews, but here in California, where the cuisine is interpreted at restaurants such as Oakland's Doukkala, and chef Eric Lanvert uses local ingredients to evoke the dishes of Fes, Casablanca and Marrakech.

"Back in the days when I was in the French army, they used to ship us to Dakar in Senegal," Lanvert says. "We used to stop in Morocco and try the delicious cuisine."

So it didn't take much convincing when Doukkala owner Jamal Zahid approached Lanvert and suggested he turn his French background -- he was the chef at San Francisco's Rue Saint Jacques and Cote Sud -- south of the Mediterranean Sea. Now he spends his days surrounded by tagines -- both the pots and the stews.

"We have a considerable amount of tagines," he says. "Forty of them. They constantly break! And none of them is the same size. In a restaurant setting, it's not ideal."

Advertisement

Ah, but on the dinner table it's delicious -- and it's a different type of flavor profile than many of us are used to. In Lanvert's hands, lamb is simmered with almonds and prunes or apricots. For Paris-born Michel Paillet, who runs Faim d'Epices, a cooking school just outside Marrakech, it's beef with pears and candied oranges.

"It's a great combination," Lanvert says. "Something sweet, something sour, something salty. Lamb is a very flavorful meat -- gamy -- the sweetness softens that. You add those fruits, and it starts making sense on the palate. Most of the dishes use dried fruit, but I make beef cheeks and put preserved lemon in there. When you eat it, it's like, 'Oh yeah.'"

Paillet and his staff offer a daylong cooking class that starts with batbout, incredibly easy inch-high flatbreads that are baked in communal ovens in the city's ancient medina -- but can be made in a skillet on the stove just as easily -- and continues on through tagines and the small salads traditionally served by the trio, the quartet or, if you're really lucky, a dozen little bowls strewn across the table.

Those salads and tagines are a topic that sends any lover of Moroccan food into a state of gushing delight. New York food writer Mark Kurlansky breezed through the Bay Area last month on a book tour for "International Night" (Bloomsbury, $29, 374 pages), a cookbook project he did with daughter Talia, a well-traveled high school freshman whose Friday night dinners were inspired by spinning a globe. They ended up loving Moroccan food so much, they devoted two of the 52 Friday night menus in the book to tagines, pastillas and other dishes they learned to make in Marrakech.

Kurlansky included recipes for everything from batbout and a tagine -- lamb with candied oranges, a dish, he says, that comes together relatively quickly because the tagine pot is such an efficient cooking vessel -- to those little salads, including an eggplant salad that is mashed before serving.

"It's garlic, tomato and eggplant, and you basically mush it together," Talia says. "It looks a little weird, but it's a good mush."

Paillet and Lanvert's versions of zaalouk are somewhat less mashed, so the flavors and textures remain distinct.

"The salads are very simple, very tasty, and you have all those fresh vegetables while having tagine or couscous," Lanvert says. "Those salads are very classic -- eggplant, a few spices, a little olive oil. I do beet salad with quail eggs, and I give it a French twist with mache. Shredded cucumber and shredded carrots with garlic and spices. Asparagus with a honey vinaigrette and spices."

And oranges, Mark Kurlansky adds, with olives, fresh herbs and argan oil, a nutty oil unique to Morocco. "That happens to be one of my two favorite recipes in the book," he says.

The beauty of those salads is that they can be thrown together quickly, during the hour the tagine is burbling away on the stove.

"A tagine," Mark says, "does not take all day to make."

That the aromas perfume your home and send your thoughts drifting in a Saharan direction is just a bonus.

Tagine 101

The distinctive ceramic pots used in North African cooking don't just look great. They are incredibly versatile. They promote slow, even cooking on the stovetop over a direct flame or electric burner, and their conical tops gently trap and drip the dish's moisture and juices back into the stew or couscous.

Tagines come in a variety of sizes, large and small, glazed and unglazed. The smaller quart-size versions are typically used for individual portions, the larger for family servings.

Unless you want a large collection of tagines -- or only want to cook one type of protein forever -- opt for a glazed model. Unglazed tagines take on the flavor of whatever you cooked in them, so a tagine that has been used for seafood, for example, will give anything else you make a distinctly fishy whiff.

Tagines are available at kitchen stores, such as Sur la Table, as well as specialty shops, like The Spanish Table. Prices vary dramatically, from $30 to $180, with no apparent rhyme or reason. One thing to consider is the pot's lid and how easy it is to grasp the top -- which may be an actual knob or merely a tapering slope.

Be careful handling the pot when cooking. It's hot, the steam inside is even hotter and the lid, especially on the larger models, can be difficult to lift without sneaking a hand or spatula underneath an edge for support -- hence the warning. A hot pad offers insufficient protection when steam whooshes out.

Moroccan fare

Moroccan food is not as well-represented in the Bay Area as, say, Sichuan or Mexican food, but there are a number of enticing Moroccan restaurants around. Here's just a sampling that runs the full gamut, from Michelin-starred Aziza to Menara, which offers belly dancing and a hookah lounge:

Kitchen on Fire: This Berkeley cooking school offers Moroccan cooking classes as part of its Couples in the Kitchen and regional cooking series. Check out the schedule at http://kitchenonfire.com.

Draeger's Cooking School: Joanne Weir is teaching a course on modern Moroccan cooking at the San Mateo cooking school on Sept. 25; www.draegerscookingschool.com.If you're heading to Morocco and want to not only taste the culture but learn to cook it as well, Faim d'Epices' highly entertaining daylong classes include transportation to and from your Marrakech hotel; www.faimdepices.com.